Phase 2!

We’re presenting at WearableTechLA on Th, July 17!

Congratulations Team Compass H2O! We won 3rd place and we’re pitching at WearableTechLA on Th, July 17!

What’s the next gen for us?

Are we cleaning up what we’ve got? Or doing a complete new push? Are we working each at our own locations? Or getting together? Do we have any further support at the Wind Tunnel? Syuzi made a casual comment at the after party about all the new development we’d be doing. I imagine we might be hearing from someone at XWD / MDP about what we should be planning… but we should also think for ourselves on where we’d like to go.

Jury Feedback

Natalia attaches Compass H2O to Maggie Hendrie’s wrist.

Team Compass H2O had 2 opportunities to speak with the jurors. After the presentations they came by our design area, looked at the device and discussed it with us. And after the awards they gave us their feedback on our product. Based on their questions and feedback it seems that Maggie Hendrie may have been the juror most interested in Compass H2O. Maggie loved the wayfinding potential of our device, but was skeptical of the specific find water use. She felt that in the developing world the issue wasn’t really finding your way to clean water, but not having clean water at all. And in the developed world she didn’t see that many occasions when you’d really need to know where the water was.

* Sensing your body state is really interesting
* But being Super-Fitbit is not so interesting
* The wrist is going to become an increasingly valuable piece of real estate
* Wayfinding is really interesting

What Now?

The good news about Maggie & The Jurors “freeing” us from our developing world use case is that it probably was a stretched vision. It was a real need. Extreme. But a compass probably wasn’t the solution. The bad news about letting that vision go is that it puts us back to Saturday morning and our many uses conversations. Sharon, Vivia, I, and others of us had a variety of Social Compass activities, like use for the blind, National Park tours, and Cemetery exploration games. In helping us on Saturday morning, Magdalena Paluch offered a wayfinding idea that if you’re visiting a new city you might like to access the past wayfinding experience of a friend or other interesting person. No doubt someone’s already created a Leopold Bloom in Dublin wayfinding experience (from James Joyce’s novel Ulysses)

We know Google Glass has played with Social Compass ideas. Thoughs about Museum Audio Tours and Janet Cardiff counterfactual walking tours also come to mind.

The Question

Will we polish what we’ve got and present it on July 17?

Or let go of Water Finding and back our process out to Needs again in a new development?

Wearable Tech LA is the first Entertainment and Health Wearable conference held in Los Angeles. Attending Wearable Tech LA will give you an opportunity to meet and collaborate with the best of Hollywood, Music, and Sports including leaders from the NBA, NFL, NHL, and others.
According to International Data Corporation, wearables will be the fastest-emerging category and become a $12B industry in 2018. You’ll also get the inside track from industry leaders on wearables, a first look at emerging wearable computing, watch fast track pitches from 15 startups and network with top VCs, angels, large corporation (e.g. GoPro, Intel, Samsung, adidas, Qualcomm, Google, etc.) and thought leaders.

I think we definitely need to meet up at least once before July 17. We can set up a meeting and talk about the feedback we got. I’m free anytime after Wednesday, but my finals are coming soon. I understand Susan and Vivia might have hard time to meet up, but we will try our best.

Oh, Allia / Ekin won’t present? That’s a shame. We didn’t hear anything from Courtney / MDP this week. But next week I hope they’ll give us some info on WTLA. As Sharon said above, it might be more of a “Poster Session” than “Presentation.”

The judges feedback is kind of funny – they liked the quality of our build, but didn’t like it on the wrist, and didn’t like the water finding use case as much as wayfinding. So they sort of said, “we love your work, now throw it away and start over”! 😛

The answer to the 1st 1/2 of that, off the wrist might be that we aren’t going to have time to develop that before the 17th, even if we wanted to?

The use case though is mostly presentation rather than engineering to do now, so we could develop that if we wanted to.

For meeting F2F, Mon-Wed-Fri are a little better for me, but my schedule is flexible ATM, so I can probably work out any day that works for others. I’m happy going up to Art Center, or wherever we like. You’re all welcome at my place in Rosemead, too.

We probably can’t get all 8 of us together, but as many of us as want to / are able to, would be great. And we can also discuss here on the website, or we could do a Google Video Hangout.